The smugness files

The Telegraph is rubbing its nasty hands in glee (yes I know newspapers don’t actually have hands – they have gills) about yet another scientist saying ew ick about yet another scientist who missed an opportunity to credit god for making something out of nothing.

[Susan Greenfield] criticised the “smugness” of scientists who claim to “have all the answers”… in a BBC Radio 4 Today programme discussion about [Stephen] Hawking’s views. Last week he angered many religious believers by saying science “can explain the universe without the need for a creator”.

Says the Telegraph, self-righteously and bullyingly – and in fact smugly. The Telegraph smugly assumes that scientists and others are not supposed to “anger religious believers” by attempting to describe the world as it is. The Telegraph smugly reports the putative “anger” of religious believers as if it were important, and deplorable, and someone’s fault. There’s something more than a little Talibanish about that – ironically enough.

Greenfield said: “Science can often suffer from a certain smugness and complacency…What we need to preserve in science is a curiosity and an open-mindedness rather than a complacency and a sort of arrogance where we attack people who come at the big truths and the big questions albeit using different strategies.”

Meaning what? That scientists shouldn’t point out (which is apparently the sort of thing Greenfield means by “attack”) that certain strategies for getting at “the big truths” (as well as the small ones) are bad strategies because they don’t get at any actual truth? That seems to be what she means, but she’s dressed it up in the usual cozy patronizing PR-speak that disguises the frank anti-inquiry purport of claims like that.

Asked whether she was uncomfortable about scientists making comments about God, she said: “Yes I am. Of course they can make whatever comments they like but when they assume, rather in a Taliban-like way, that they have all the answers then I do feel uncomfortable. I think that doesn’t necessarily do science a service.”

Oh yes? Does she have the same sort of concern about popes and priests and mullahs? They generally assume they have all the answers, in a much more Taliban-like way than scientists do, so is that a problem too? If it is, the Telegraph doesn’t report the fact.

[Greenfield] added that his statement that God was not needed was “surprising”.She said: “All science is provisional and therefore to claim to have the definitive answer to anything is a hardline view. It would be very great shame if young people think that to be a scientist you must be an atheist.”

But it isn’t surprising at all, it’s utterly routine, and she must know that perfectly well. It’s also not the case that he claimed “to have the definitive answer,” and she probably knows that too. The whole thing is just yet more of the predictable party line, and it’s as inaccurate as the party line pretty much always is. It’s also as one-sided as it almost always is – telling off scientists for making claims but never telling off clerics for doing so with much less to back the claims up.

Her remarks are likely to be interpreted as a criticism of Professor Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist and bestselling author of The God Delusion who helped to pay for buses emblazoned with adverts declaring “there’s probably no God”.

Says the Telegraph pruriently, shit-stirring for no obvious reason except that it can.

First, what Dawkins said in the Blind Watchmaker about atheism and evolution does not arrogantly assert god does not exist, but only that evolution offers an explanation for organismal diversity that doesn’t need god.

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Second, the misogynists are coming out of the woodwork to bash Greenfield because she is a woman (is that redundant). Her sex has nothing to do with her argument’s worth; we all know plenty of males making equally silly arguments about atheism.

Oh, really, this is too much! The church has been baiting non-believers for so long with the tag line, “Science can tell us how, but not why,” it is a bit much to be told that it is smug for a scientist to return the compliment. Good heavens, the Archbishop of Canterbury, not noticing what Hawkings had done, actually responded to him with the “Religion can tell us why” story, when what Hawking is saying, quite clearly, is that physics, as we know it, has come to the point where it can say that the reason why is that the laws of physics require it. That’s why we’re here.

If Susan Greenfield doesn’t like the answer, she can roll over and play dead if she likes, but it won’t make a bit of difference: won’t change the rotation of the earth, won’t change its path around the sun, won’t change the laws of physics, won’t change the fact that this is something that scientists are now ready to say, with all the reasonable qualifications that scientists make when they say such things. But it’s just something more the religious are going to have to take on board. It’s going to be a tough one, this time, because they’ve just lost their favourite response to non-believers. Wow! No more science gives you the how, religion gives you the why! No wonder they’re shaken up. Great piece of deconstruction, however. Skewered and simmering, I should think.

Her “I am an Atheist Butte” argument is such a cliché you’d think that papers would ignore it. When it is compounded with “Hawking is just like the Taliban!!!1one!” analogies she ought to have been filed with the bin labeled “Lunatics”. It’s disgraceful considering her putative education and intelligence.

It is especially annoying when coupled with the seemingly amazing new fact that Stephen Hawking does not believe in God. It is hardly news. Anyone who claims to have read A brief history of time and actually thinks this was the work of a man who thought the concept of an interfering God was plausible is a sub-literate moron or lying about the fact that they actually read the book. My preference is explanation No 2.My other problem with her stupid opinions is that it seems to have emboldened every misogynist troglodyte out there to trot out their stupid opinions.

I think I am off to drown my sorrows in a glass of wine. Two glasses of wine.

Yeah, damn those smug scientists for dismissing all those “different approaches” to truth like phlogiston, the four elements and humours, the elan vital, geocentrism, etc, etc.Arrogant know-it-all bastards.

Some commenters here seem to think that Susan Greenfield is not a scientist. She is, and a reasonably good one in her field too. But she does seem to suffer from the smugness and complacency that she accuses others of, since she’s come out with countless pronouncements about lots of things which she obviously knows not the slightest.

There’s that typical assertion that ‘science doesn’t know everything’ or ‘science is not a final answer’. True and trivial. But they always seem to want to use it to imply that ‘science doesn’t really know anything’ and, by extension, anything goes. Essentially a dismissal of any kind of real knowledge or hope for knowledge.

Hawking (for example) doesn’t know everything, but he does know a lot of things. There always seems to be this jump from where, upon realizing that science knows more than they realize, science must be claiming to know everything, so we can sneer and dismiss it. I think of it as a surfacing anti-intellectualism more than anything.

Scientists may not “know everything”, but at least what they do know is about stuff that actually exists.

How can theologians be said to know anything about how the universe really works (or these so-called “Big Questions”) when they can’t even agree with each other? Not only that , they have no mechanism to sort useful answers from crap ones.

[Greenfield] added that his statement that God was not needed was “surprising”.She said: “All science is provisional and therefore to claim to have the definitive answer to anything is a hardline view. It would be very great shame if young people think that to be a scientist you must be an atheist.”

If through the laws of physics and through associated logic one arrives at a theory, then yes, that is as definitive as you can get. Greenfield is confusing physics with some other branch of science such as pharmacology – her own limited domain. To call that hardline is a serious misunderstanding of the philosophy of science on her part.

And for heaven’s sake what does that have to do with being an atheist to produce science? To say God is dead, affects not just science. In fact science would be the least affected of most domains.

This interview is utterly disgusting. No wonder Baroness Greenfield, a member of the House of Lords is such a darling with the establishment. She speaks their same nonsensical language when it comes to matters of science in society.

Lady Greenfield, a distinguished neuroscientist who was appointed director of the Royal Institution in 1998, has launched legal proceedings against it claiming she was the victim of sexual discrimination and unfairly dismissed in January.

Rebel members at the organisation failed in their bid to oust its ruling body and reinstate her as the head of the organisation.

Professor Dawkins opposed the moves to reinstate Lady Greenfield, saying: Somebody who is threatening to sue the institution is not someone I would want to be the director.”

From Times of London:

Her unconventional approach to courting publicity, however, has annoyed as many scientists as it attracts, some of whom claim that her talent for self-promotion outweighs her scientific credentials. She has been rejected as a candidate for fellowship of the Royal Society, the elite national academy of science.

Then Greenfield spent $30M on referbishing the Institution without having a good idea where to get the money from. She drove it into the ground and they are almost bankrupt. Not much of a businesswoman and manager.

I wonder what Greenfield has published that she now challenges Hawking and Dawkins? She is playing the victim card, based on her gender. Any surprise that Greenfield comes up with such (Taliban) drivel?

Asked whether she was uncomfortable about scientists making comments about God, she said: “Yes I am. Of course they can make whatever comments they like but when they assume, rather in a Taliban-like way, that they have all the answers then I do feel uncomfortable. I think that doesn’t necessarily do science a service.”Oh yes? Does she have the same sort of concern about popes and priests and mullahs? They generally assume they have all the answers, in a much more Taliban-like way than scientists do, so is that a problem too?

This comment wins the Internet. Is it really that hard for people to notice that religious leaders have spent millennia claiming that they have all the answers? And more so, unlike scientists, they claim that their answers are absolute, unchallengeable, and require no evidence!

It’s as if some people can only look for arrogance when they’re facing in one direction. Even the civil, peaceful, purely speech-based criticisms of the Gnu Atheists cause them to howl with outrage – but let them turn the other way, and the mountainous, threatening, violent certainty of so many religious groups is completely invisible to them.

“Science can often suffer from a certain smugness and complacency…What we need to preserve in science is a curiosity and an open-mindedness rather than a complacency and a sort of arrogance where we attack people who come at the big truths and the big questions albeit using different strategies.”

Try replacing “science” with “religion” in that passage, and then tell me which it fits better.

There’s that typical assertion that ‘science doesn’t know everything’ or ‘science is not a final answer’. True and trivial. But they always seem to want to use it to imply that ‘science doesn’t really know anything’ and, by extension, anything goes. Essentially a dismissal of any kind of real knowledge or hope for knowledge.

Or a variant, which I call the “Science is not everything, therefore religion is something” argument.

It is true that science is not the epistemological be-all end-all. Science, for instance, can’t help me decide my favorite flavor of ice cream. It also may not be very useful in most aspects of art appreciation. It does not help me to write songs for my band.

So there are indeed “other ways of knowing” that are not entirely illegitimate, albeit those are more about the acquiring of subjective knowledge rather than establishing objective fact, so one could debate whether it really counts as epistemology.

I have read a good deal of the Bible over the years, and some other books that some consider holy. Curiously, and despite theologians’ assurances to the contrary, I have never found within one of them and answer to the question ‘why?’ Oh sure, to a few less than ultimate ‘whys’, but not to the ultimate one.

Why do we exist? Because God decided to make us and the rest of the Universe. But why does God exist. Answer: always has. But that does not answer the question of ‘why?’ Only the question ‘how long?’

My conclusion is that religion teaches its adherents a three card trick to play on the unsuspecting gullible. Or should that be pea and thimble?

I have read a good deal of the Bible over the years, and some other books that some consider holy. Curiously, and despite theologians’ assurances to the contrary, I have never found within one of them and answer to the question ‘why?’ Oh sure, to a few less than ultimate ‘whys’, but not to the ultimate one.

Why do we exist? Because God decided to make us and the rest of the Universe. But why does God exist. Answer: always has. But that does not answer the question of ‘why?’ Only the question ‘how long?’

My conclusion is that religion teaches its adherents a three card trick to play on the unsuspecting gullible. Or should that be pea and thimble?

Susan Greenfield was one of the 20-ish interviewees in Susan Blackmore’s “Conversations on Consciousness” (what’s with “Susan” and colors?). I remember nothing specific about either her or the interview but do recall a vague “something” about her interview that made me uncomfortable – a reaction I had to none of the others. Thanks for providing this insight into what that “something” might have been.